Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Second reading; first read about 1990


This is a beautiful book in so many ways. The descriptions of the wild landscapes of the 19th Century West--the mountains, the high deserts, the plant life, the clouds, the very feel of the air--are so wonderfully rendered that they are transporting. The twin stories--the wheelchair-bound historian in the late 1960s and the history he writes about his grandparents--are most interesting and come together most cunningly in the end to comment on ageless themes of loyalty and forgiveness. It's an impressive achievement, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

However, as I have taken to doing since I hooked into the Internet, I read biographical information about the author before beginning the book, and it almost spoiled the book for me. As it turns out, the pioneering grandmother in the story (Susan Burling Ward)is modeled on a real person, Mary Hollock Foote, who was a well known illustrator and writer of the time. That's all well and good; many writers of fiction pattern their characters on real-life people. Stegner even acknowledges "J.M. (Foote's granddaughter) and her sister for the loan of their ancestors" and writes that the novel "utilizes selected facts from their real lives." What was later discovered by researching academics was that fully 10 percent of the text of the novel is a verbatim copy of passages from Foote's actual letters and journals. Does that constitute plagiarism? It's debatable, but that blurring between fact and fiction bothered me throughout the reading of the book.

I could not surrender myself to the narration of the fictional Susan Burling Ward's life because I kept wondering how much was Stegner's imagination and how much was the actual writing of Mary Hollock Foote. Was the real person actually ashamed of and embarrassed by her husband? Did she actually feel herself so arrogantly superior to most of the people of the West? Was she actually a closet lesbian? Or was that Stegner's interpretation and imagination? Were all the many letters included in the text exact copies of her correspondence, or were some partial copies or entirely made up.

If I had not read the biographical information first, I would have given this a high rating, but as it stands I cannot. I wish Stegner had chosen to use his source material as the basis for a biography rather than for a novel, because the real Mary Hollock Foote did, indeed, lead a most interesting life.